Speaking at the Global Symposium

Tomorrow I am speaking at this year’s Global Symposium to be held by the Centre for Management Consulting Excellence. The theme is the skills needed by management consultants for the future (around 2030).

 

In preparation I have been reading a new book by George Binney and others, provocatively called ‘Breaking Free of Bonkers’.

 

The book concludes with these words from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France. These seem apt words, not only for management consultants, but politicians
too:

“(The social order) is the result of the thoughts of many minds in many ages. It is no simple, no superficial thing, nor to be estimated by superficial understandings. An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.”